NEW YORK—Stressing that the sport’s existing suite of advanced metrics was no longer sufficient to satisfy their hunger for increasingly granular data, baseball analysts from across the country called Wednesday for the creation of a new statistic called B.L.E.P.H. “We don’t care what it measures or how it’s calculated—we just need something called B.L.E.P.H., and we need it now,” FanGraphs contributor Derek Gardner said on behalf of the larger baseball analyst community, adding that it was extremely important that B.L.E.P.H. be “complicated as all hell” and require “fuck-tons of math” to measure, and that it should make “complex shit like Pythagorean winning percentage look as simple as counting balls and strikes.” “Seriously, we’re fiending over here. Man cannot live on VORP and BABIP allowed alone. We are desperate for B.L.E.P.H., and someone must give it to us immediately. Maybe it weighs a player’s chase rate against their religion—don’t think there’s a stat for that yet. Whatever the hell it is, it doesn’t really matter as long as it’s an acronym. Maybe it could be something like ‘Baseball Lineup Expected Probability of Hurt’ that tells you how likely it is that someone in the lineup gets hurt? I don’t know. Frankly, that’s for the eggheads to figure out. Our job is to demand B.L.E.P.H.” Gardner went on to confirm that baseball analysts would also accept B.L.E.P.H.−, B.L.E.P.H.+, xB.L.E.P.H., or B.L.E.P.H. above replacement, so long as all four were immediately available in easily sortable rankings on all of the websites they already frequent.
